[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Proposal to change Evergreen versioning scheme

[Jason Stephenson]

Quoting Justin Hopkins <justin at mobiusconsortium.org>:

> Why are we so focused on the numbering scheme? I don't think the time
> spent worrying about what number we are on does anything to improve
> the project.

I pretty much agree with you. However, version numbers are important  
to end users and system administrators because it gives them some  
notion of what features are in a given release. And they can use the  
compatibility matrix on  
http://www.open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=versioning to see what  
other software they need. (Granted that matrix is missing 2.3 at the  
moment.)

That said, if you follow the guidelines at the top of the version  
page, 2.1 should have been 3.0 because the required versions of  
PostgreSQL and OpenSRF changed, 2.2 should have been 4.0 for the same  
reasons, and 2.3 should be 5.0 because the xulrunner requirement has  
changed quite a bit.

The outcome of the discussion that Alexey refers to was to throw out  
the guidelines which are still posted on that page. It was decided  
that any version numbering scheme is no more or less arbitrary than  
any other, so we'll just be arbitrary and change version numbers  
whenever it feels right.

I disagree with that decision because I think the older scheme could  
actually be more useful to the end user, though it was end user "fear"  
that was the driving force behind the decision to increment the major  
version less often. It was felt by the majority of developers that  
users would be more reluctant to upgrade to a 3.0 release from a 2.0  
rather than to a 2.1 release.

I should also clarify that the discussion was not just limited to  
developers. Several system administrators and users also gave their  
opinions. These discussion are open to anyone who wants to sign up to  
the dev mailing list or join us in IRC.

> I suspect this is coming up because of bericks recent post about
> release scheduling - which I (personally) do think would improve the
> project.

It could be, but Bill's email is really about the monthly dot releases  
with bug fixes rather than about the bigger releases that now happen  
twice a year. It was aimed at the developers because we're the ones  
mostly affected by it. His email was basically a rallying cry to get  
us to stick to our goal of doing a bug fix release of supported  
versions every month. The question mainly affects the 2.2 and 2.3  
release maintainers.

All of that being said, the version numbering scheme is not  
particularly important to me or to my institution. We run Evergreen  
from the master git branch and update whenever we feel it is worth it.

-- 
Jason Stephenson
Assistant Director for Technology Services
Merrimack Valley Library Consortium
Chief Bug Wrangler, Evergreen ILS

-- 
Jason Stephenson
Assistant Director for Technology Services
Merrimack Valley Library Consortium
Chief Bug Wrangler, Evergreen ILS